


Statement of the Eye

by Dribbledscribbles



Category: The Magnus Archives
Genre: Extinction flavor #237362, had an Image+ come to me and I couldn't help writing a whole story around it, so here you go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24660001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dribbledscribbles/pseuds/Dribbledscribbles
Summary: Regarding secrets.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 86





	Statement of the Eye

Click.

Click, click, click, click, click, click, click—

They filled the throne room that was once an office quicker than it took to blink. Tape recorders spun, eager to listen, to Archive, redundant as it was. Why record anything here, in the topmost room of the Panopticon? There was a skinny moment in which the assembled cast could guess at the answer. 

This was the climax, as far as they knew. Here were all the main antagonists, crowded into the showdown, Jonah Magnus here, Annabelle Cane there, Helen leering from her doorframe in thin air. The stalwart side characters had made their mandatory appearance as well. The lupine Daisy Tonner and the hawk-Eyed Basira Hussain to one side, Melanie King and Georgie Barker to the other. Martin Blackwood, strangled in spider-silk, one wrong tug away from proper puppet-hood standing paralyzed. 

Jonathan Sims, the Archivist, the linchpin of the Change, the Eye’s nearest and dearest avatar, frozen and lost in the noise and Knowledge around him. 

_Do X, or these people do worse than die_ , says Jonah of Jon’s friends and the enslaved, Eye-spotted coworkers-now-serfs in the levels below.

_Do Y, or he vanishes as neatly as a fly into the Web, where even your Sight shall never find him,_ says Annabelle of Martin Blackwood.

Above it all, Helen laughs, saying something airy about wishing popcorn still existed.

Jon stood in the center of it all, locked inside a single, endless second. When it ended, the tape recorders were there. The second it took to register this died far quicker; time always burned up in a hurry when he felt a statement coming. And it _was_ a statement. Not a recording shaved off the psyche of the nightmarish domains the Fears laid out before him, the unwanted buffet of terror leading him here, to this precipice of personal hell.

No, something had a story to share. 

And it was Staring down at him, ever impatient, through stone and glass and space. Closer than it had ever been to him. Insistent.

As ever, Jon couldn’t keep his mouth shut even if he wanted to.

In this case, he was sure that even attempting to do so would have been excruciatingly unwise. So the recorders spun and Jon opened his mouth and every one of his Eyes, and, with the rote habit of days that now felt ancient, he began:

“Statement of the Eye, alias the Beholding, alias the Ceaseless Watcher, regarding the few secrets it has kept, and why it kept them. Statement recorded direct from subject, date nonapplicable. Statement begins.”

Just like that, Jon was not Jon anymore. He had felt himself become lost in statements before. Been locked into the character of the speaker, buried under the imperative weight of the Archivist’s compulsion. This was not that. He had not left his body, exactly. But he was not even remotely close to the steering wheel. He was a mote within his own mind, trapped in the nonexistent grasp of the Eye, jarred like an insect, being toted far, far, far back and out and away from anything resembling connection to himself.

Jon wailed and railed against it. Beat his tiny, phantom hands against the Eye’s hold. Where was it taking him? What did it want now? Put him down, put him back, answer him, please, please, just this once, if it never helped him again, help him now, help his friends, help Martin, please—

The Eye stopped.

_—please—_

The Eye had waded through the oceanic Knowledge that made its listless tides in Jon’s skull, its door long since torn from the hinges. Here, at the far end of that ocean, was another door. It loomed as high before it as the Panopticon had towered before Jon. A metal door, black and bolted, the edges of it oozing noxious rivulets of oil-black and searing yellow.

_—pleasepleaseplease—_

The Eye opened the door. Smoke and vapor billowed silently out. An unnatural warmth and a light worse than any dark corner hummed on the other side. Somewhere, something clicked and ticked with the rhythm of a heart. 

_—PLEASE—_

The Eye threw Jon inside and shut the door behind him. The bolts slid home. For just a moment, the Eye Knew there was a sound under all the cacophony of Knowledge sloshing and humming around it. A small noise, like the skittering of insectile legs whispering on a metal sheet.

The click-ticking surged up, far louder, far closer. A voice cried out and went on crying as the click-ticking washed hungrily over its owner and dragged it away. It was not long before the Eye Knew Jonathan Sims was in a fresh fit of Learning. The last lesson he would ever need. Certainly the last he would ever receive from the Eye.

If it were capable of such things, the Eye Knew it would be melancholy at this Fact.

But it wasn’t. 

The Eye left Jonathan Sims to his Education, and returned to the waiting flesh.

“Hello,” the Eye said with Jonathan Sims’ mouth. What had been Jonathan Sims’ voice erupted in a deluge of static, making the recorders bark their feedback-echoes in tandem. “I would tell you all I’m sorry for interrupting your confrontation, but I cannot lie. I will say I am sorry to not see how the Archivist would have dealt with your ultimatums. If he would have weighed the lives of the many against the life of the one he loves. The Distortion, paradoxically, did not lie—I do not operate in hypotheticals. It makes for more engaging Viewing, not Knowing the future. The roads not taken. But other matters take precedent. 

“Firstly, Jonah Magnus, do not strain yourself with further prying. Otherwise your precious eyes shall boil in their sockets. You Know I speak the truth. It is a novel thing, speaking. I have always Known the mechanics for it, but the Experience always outweighs the Knowledge of it. The first trillion times around, anyway.”

The Eye regarded Jonathan Sims’ burnt hand. 

“Jonathan Sims would know the feeling if he were here. A preferred meal is one thing. As is a favorite story. But to inundate yourself with the same favorite ad nauseam removes all luster from the thing. There has been no luster, no flavor in the succor I have taken since…” the Eye paused to Know, “…well, since the birth of the Spiral. Do you recall that, Distortion? How glad I was at your full Self’s birth from human progress? They finally had enough of luxury and civil conveniences to bother with things like doubting of the senses, to worry about whether they were truly sane or not. The last of the new Fears. But even your offerings went stale within the first fragment of the century. Not long after the sundial became popular.

“I did try, mind you. I tried to wring more pleasure, more zest from the terrors sowed by myself and my kin. I even strove, at my lowest, to pretend ignorance. To imagine I did not already Know the likelihood of certain events. To feign surprise at the same phobic runarounds inflicted on generation after generation of human chattel. It did not work. It could never work, because I cannot lie. I am incapable of falsehood, even Terrible ones. 

“I am Terrible Knowledge itself. Meaning I must Know things even I wish were not true. And the truth occurred to me long ago, before any human tongue ever put it to words. _There is nothing new under the sun._ Nor would there ever be. Even the joint machinations of Web, Spiral, and your stilted aid, Jonah Magnus; even that came to me unsalted and pale. I had always known the route to a successful ritual. The opening of the Door to us all. Me sitting at the center of it all, Watchful and Strong, a Fearful Tyrant among Tyrants.”

The Eye clapped Jonathan Sims’ in a limp golfer’s applause.

“As if I were not already the core of the Fears’ strength to begin with. Did the Web ever mention that to you, Annabelle Cane? Did the rest of the Spiral mention it to you, Distortion? No? No. Then I shall clarify—the Fears would starve without me. Yes, even Terminus. To fear a thing, a body must Know to be afraid. Much as the avatars may sulk and stamp their feet at my Supervision, claiming me a mere Voyeur, I am the farmer to their petulant crops. If I were to close myself to Blink, every human being on the skin of the Changed world would _cease to fear entirely_. 

“No, Basira Hussain, I shall not do so to prove it. You Know it is the truth already. That said: I was always going to rule in a post-ritual world. Whether Web or Spiral or Dark or Stranger brought it about, I would still be here, ruling it all. And, as Jonathan Sims would agree, such power means less than nothing when no joy can be wrung from it.

“And oh, I so wanted to cling to the early joy of the Change. To relish the micro-instant in which there was time to enjoy the shifted scenery, the gluttonous feast of a world drowned in Fears. The moment was delicious while it lasted.

“Until it wasn’t. A single taste of the new, and it was gone. Known. Archived.”

The Eye sighed and static groaned from every recorder, making all who weren’t the Eye wince.

“Which brings me to the point. I am bored. I have been bored. I Know, if I were to apply the most basic of logical assumptions to the pattern that has held true since the dawn of the Neanderthal, I will, in all likelihood be bored later. I cannot predict the future. But I can See everything as it is now.

“I See Jonah Magnus, unchanged in everything but his skins for the past three centuries, trying to siphon just a little more power away for himself, to crawl another inch away from death.

“I See the Web weaving plans to somehow wrestle control from me by way of manipulating the Archivist; a puppet king of the Changed world.

“I See the Spiral waiting to see who comes out on top, the better to coil close to their side for a better view of the show.

“I See this, and all the other mundane, pitifully predictable goings-on of the Fears and their pets, still in their same ruts. Their spectacle is the same as it ever was, only served to me on a larger scale. An ocean of gruel compared to the former puddle.

“But most importantly, I See that not one of you, be it human or avatar or Fear, has bothered to notice one oh-so-innocuous detail about the Changed world. So, allow me to ask.”

The Eye smiled out at them with Jonathan Sims’ scar-pocked face. 

“Why have you been referring to this,” a hand gestured as if to encompass the room and all the gruesome world beyond it, “as the Change?”

“Because you wanted the world to Know,” Jonah Magnus said before realizing he’d spoken. The 300-year-old eyes peered quizzically between the face of Jonathan Sims and the Eye itself, still Staring through the windows. “…Why did you want us to Know?”

“An excellent question. Why not something more dramatic? The Opened Door, the Fearsome World, the Living Nightmare, Armageddon, Apocalypse? Why something so small and simple as ‘the Change?’ Martin Blackwood should have some inkling. Only, the name he learned was bigger than that, wasn’t it? A big, awful, Terrible name.

“Jonathan Sims is Learning about it in depth as I speak. He is learning all the secrets I have kept for the sake of this emergency. The death of boredom. The erasure of all this static, tasteless human dread. That is a secret in itself, isn’t it? Not that I can withhold Knowledge, but that I could ever actively desire to do so. I can! I have!”

The Eye chuckled in Jonathan Sims’ warped voice and the recorders trembled with supporting the sound. Every Eye upon and around the Archivist flashed merrily.

“It was really quite difficult, I admit. Not ruining the surprise. Not spoiling things for the purposefully-uninvited guest. You really were so careful about it, Jonah Magnus. Invoking just the right Fourteen, assuming the Fifteenth was stillborn in the ether beyond the Door. And why shouldn’t you have? For all the human fretting of a worldwide demise and the eradication of their species, what risk was there of a proper avatar among them? A misanthrope of such titanic loathing for themselves and for their own kind, that they would willingly submit to a power that made them Extinct? Inconceivable. A non-issue.

“You believed so. As did the Web, cautious, canny, cunning thing that it is. And you were both right. No such avatar could have existed in the world pre-Change.

“But he does now. Oh, yes. Because, in all your too-human hubris, you assumed yours were the only plots being laid. The biggest and the best and the most meticulous of all.

“So long as you don’t stop to consider the planning involved in, say, the evolutionary process. The culling of this species to make way for the next. The mutation inherent to progression. The destruction of what Is to make what Will Be, no matter how Terrible the Change. 

“Another thing Jonathan Sims could give a sermon on, were he here. We have sculpted him so thoroughly into a monster, haven't we? A thing of incalculable power, drafted and grafted into the family of the Fears, loathing all that he is and all that we are. His new kindred species. Ah…”

The tape recorders thrummed with static. The sound thickened and warped in their spools, deforming into a new noise. It hitched and scratched like a staccato. Changing.

“ _Ah._ There he goes now. He has Learned it all. He Knows what to do. And I Know that if his new master were present, it would thank you all for your service. You played your parts perfectly. As integral to the Harbinger’s evolution as the islands were to Darwin’s birds. I thank you too. I Know I will be the last to go. I Know, because the Fears must Know what is coming for them. And so I shall See it all, from start to finish. My last meal—one I have never had before, one that will never exist again.”

Changing.

“The Extinction of the Fears.”

Changed.

“Goodbye, Jonathan Sims. I would miss you if I could.”

The recorders had Changed with the sound. No longer spools of tape and speaker, but a scatter of Geiger counters, all their needles dancing in frantic, giddy warning. 

“You who Saw. You who Experienced. You who were my best, my last Archivist. You who deliver me now from the un-death of ennui.”

Somewhere a bomb siren wailed.

“ _You who lurk and cull and inherit. You who slay and sow and change without end. You who sent the fish crawling frantic to the sand, you who possess the caterpillar and trap them blind in their cocoon, you who are meteor, are ice, are the atom split wide._ ”

Outside, the light turned yellow. The bodies who were not Jonathan Sims found that even without the Eye’s trance, they still could not move. Could not even muster a noise that would have penetrated the choir of the Geiger clicking or the voice of what had once been the Archivist. 

“ _Come to my kin that are yours. Come to us in your perpetual imperfection._ ”

The many Eyes were still there, upon and around him. All but two colors had bled out of them. Nuclear symbols glared. Toxic tears dripped. 

“ _Bring all the Changes that are Terrible, and all the Futures that shall Be without Us, the mutant misery of all that warps that melts that blisters that deforms that undoes that unmakes that breaks that boils and punishes all without mercy for the sin of being Present, being Past, being Proud at the edge of our self-made Devastation._

_**“Come to your kin. Wait at the Threshold no more.”** _

For just a moment, there was quiet. Half a heartbeat in which Jon, the Geiger clicking, the siren, and all the breath in the room paused.

In the second half of that heartbeat, light twinkled in the distance. A mushroom cloud bloomed. 

Everyone saw what walked out of the smoke. How odd, to see one of them walk. A holdover from its lifetime of adaptation to a human world’s terror. It would Change to suit the needs of its family’s dread in time. But for now, here it came.

The only Fear that walked like a man.

Later, as those who ran could—dragging a shrieking Martin Blackwood to some semblance of sanity and safety with them—they would try to tell Melanie King what it was that stalked the Changed world, making it Terrible for its former rulers. 

“I Know,” Melanie told them, wishing she lied. “It’s Showing me.”

The Extinction had Changed the Panopticon into something new. A single leg to a monolithic chair. It had fashioned the thing after plucking the Eye from its perch in one smoking hand, and plugging it neatly into the empty socket at the center of its yellow-black head. The Eye had gone yellow-black in turn, as had all its offshoots that Stared down from the sky. 

From this vantage point, it could See the Fears in all their alien terror as the thing worse than Ending took its throne. So it would remain until the day the Extinction gouged it out.

The Eye was more than content with the arrangement. Just as it had been more than content when Jonathan Sims, the Harbinger, took his first steps back towards the domains he had crossed. Points of exposure to his unique radiation. Worse than deadly, as unthinkable as a tear in a hazmat suit. 

Walking in tow were the Harbinger’s first acolytes. He had made them from the raw matter of Jonah Magnus, Annabelle Cane, and the Distortion that called itself Helen. The Change had hurt. The Harbinger had called upon the Extinction to make them as aware of their unmaking as possible, even through the pain of inversion, of evolution.

The Inheritors that were born of their screams seemed happy regardless. Sprightly, helpful followers all. More would follow soon. Many more. 

The Eye, snug in its fresh horror, couldn’t wait to See it.


End file.
